Russian aviation investigators have launched an inquiry into yesterday's passenger plane crash northeast of Moscow in which 43 of the 45 people on board were killed.
The two survivors are said to be in a critical condition in hospital.
Most of the casualties were members of one of the country's top ice hockey team, Locomotiv Yaroslavl.
The YAK-42 plane had just taken off from Yaroslavl, 250km from the capital, on a flight to Minsk in Belarus when it crashed near the airport.
Tributes have been paid to the team and officials, which drew members from many nationalities.
Among international victims were three Czech world champions, a Swedish goalkeeper, a renowned Slovak forward and a Canadian coach. Many had played around the world, including in North America's National Hockey League.
"This is the darkest day in the history of our sport," International Ice Hockey Federation President Rene Fasel said in a statement after the crash of the Yak-42 aircraft.
"This is not only a Russian tragedy, the Lokomotiv roster included players and coaches from ten nations."
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed condolences to relatives of the victims in a Kremlin statement and on the Internet. "Lokomotiv fans are grieving, the whole country is grieving," he wrote on Twitter.
In Yaroslavl, thousands of fans and residents gathered in the streets after dark, waving team scarves in Lokomotiv's red, blue and white colours and chanting slogans like "Loko lives!".
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered Transport Minister Igor Levitin to the crash site and Mr Medvedev sent his first deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov.
The crash was the third in Russia with a toll in the dozens in less than two years. In June, a Tupolev Tu-134 jet slammed into a roadside while trying to land in fog in the northern Russian city of Petrozavodsk, killing 45 people.
In April 2010, Polish President Lech Kaczynski's Russian-built plane crashed near the western city of Smolensk in a thick fog, killing him and all 95 others on board.
An Antonov An-12 cargo plane crashed in August in Russia's Far East, killing 11, and an An-12 crash in Siberia in July killed seven.
The Yak-42 is a three-engine mid-range jet that entered service in 1980 and can carry 120 passengers. The most recent fatal Yak-42 crash occurred in 2003, when a Ukrainian-operated craft crashed while landing in fog in Turkey, killing 75 people including Spanish troops returning from Afghanistan.
